“I have been collecting Sol LeWitt books for some time now – initially these books were used as material for a series of animations â€“ but slowly I started buying them just to complete a collection. The search for the white spine.

Sol’s books are predominately white and when going through the shelves of book dealers I always pull out the white books with hope… repetition and repeat is a constant – I often acquire the same book twice or even three times… they all look the same.

In 2005 I produced a book called Cover Version – it featured all the covers of my Sol LeWitt books – a kind of what’s in my library compendium.

For this new piece I have fabricated an abstract version of Cover Version.

The books were laid out as if on a small table top – each book carefully measured… height, width and thickness… Certain book sellers use a similar display technique.

This was then transformed into five medium density fibre board wall mounted relief panels. Expertly cut and routed (not by me) to follow the forms given by Mr LeWitt and his publications. The painted and sanded surface made by the fabricator has been left to give the appropriate patina to the entire piece.

TUNICA presents an art of Individuals. We stand for the reality of the present.
Absolute: The new egos and the melodrama of modernity is the Exploitation of vulgarity, the Improvement of life…
TUNICA is created for this timeless fundamental Artist that exists in everybody.
Unconditional: Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people.
TUNICA is a cape of good hope.
Trust: We need the unconsciousness of humanity. Their animalistic stupidity and dreams, futurism, magic and life!
Staying power! Brave Comrades!
Long live TUNICA!

The glare that a shadow can emit is evident in recent Latin American history, a history notoriously scored by oppression, violence, disappearances, and other painful secrets tossed into the gray areas of memory and to the margins of hegemonic historical accounts. In the shadow, you’re protected by the invisibility of marginalization—at the same time you’re made vulnerable by a lack of guarantees brought about through the neglect of the dominant power. The shadows that move through us are the constant reminder of what never changes: long-standing oppression and discrimination, perpetuated all around us in a political climate of abuse and tough luck. As we name them, draw their contours and seek to resolve their enigmas, we ask ourselves to what real end do we use artistic thought to gain awareness of those shadows? Can something change? Or are those ideas mere shadow play?

Pigmentocracy in Contemporary Art

Susana Vargas Cervantes looks at the work of artists Zach Blas, Colectivo Zunga, Santiago Sierra and Erick Meyenberg through the concept of pigmentocracy. … — By Susana Vargas Cervantes

COMOClube

Amilcar Packer tells the story of Como_clube in Sao Paulo, a mutant platform for artistic creation and an environment of undisciplined living which favors free movement between genres, generations, political and socioeconomic situations, fostering performance-related productions. …

— By Amilcar Packer

Las Nietas de Nonó

Puerto Rican artists Sofia Gallisá and las Nietas de Nonó discuss their approach to the prison system in Puerto Rico and the cycle of poverty and racial and class discrimination that feeds it. …

— By Sofía Gallisá Muriente

Méthode Room

Guillaume Désanges talks about his experience developing the Méthode Room residency project at Archive House, within Theaster Gates’ Dorchester Project in South Side in Chicago. …

— Guillaume Désanges

Yɨsɨrihaɨ: Healing that rescues the shadow from genocide

Colombian artist Bárbara Santos gives an account of the making of the book Los Jaguares del Yuruparí (2015), which presents the outcome of more than 10 years of research conducted by indigenous young people from the communities of Pira-Parana in the Colombian Amazon -under the guidance of the traditional knowledge of their elders- on cultural and sacred knowledge related to the territory and its management. …

TAXIDERMY FOR LANGUAGE-ANIMALS: A book on stuffed words by Tine Melzer

Book Launch on Friday June 24 at 7.30 pm at Motto Zurich, Müllerstrasse 57, 8004 Zürich.
Live music performance, reading and talks with special guests from Amsterdam, London, Bern and Zürich.

A parrot can be trained to repeat the sounds we make when we speak. But what does a parrot say? ‘Taxidermy for Language-Animals’ examines language fragments from different practices – philosophy, literature, visual art – by exploiting some of our linguistic habits and tools. This book includes examples of ordinary language trapped in images. Games we play with language and games language plays with us are introduced. Like language itself, language-games are based on perception, habit and memory and are played in collaboration with others.

Jean-Max Colard is an art critic, exhibition curator and literary scholar.
On July 5th Wolff Verlag will present the german translation of his book
L’exposition de mes rêves, MAMCO, 2013, a collection of dreams linked to
contemporary art exhibitions, either probable, imaginary or real. A set of
texts which propose through dreams another form of art exploration and
writing.

Book presentation in the presence of the author Jean-Max Colard and the
translator Christian Hartwig Steinau.

This book aims to collect and present a comprehensive overview of the work of Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt. It is the result of a long and intense immersion into her archive, and intends to establish the importance of this unique artist – who did not have much recognition in the past – not only to the present day, but also to the precise political context and time to which she and her work belong.

The book presents her typewritings series, all produced between the early 1970s (some of the earliest works are dated 1972) and 1989.
Mail Art was her way to be in contact with the world outside the GDR, otherwise impossible to reach. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Reunification, the artist stopped producing any art: She felt her involvement was no longer “needed”.

At the beginning of 2015 we started to archive Ruth Wolf- Rehfeldt’s work, discovering little by little an enormous and fascinating body of work, composed by more classic poetry, simple typewriting texts, visual poetry, concrete poetry, and abstraction.
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Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt was born in Wurzen, saxony, in 1932.
In 1950 she moved to Berlin, where she still lives today. In 1954 she met the artist Robert Rehfeldt, who she married a year later. She was employed by the exhibitions department at the Academy of Arts, and spent her spare time making drawings. A few years later she started to develop what would become her typical typewriter graphics, and became an active participant in the international Mail art movement. She stopped making art after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Four variations on nothing or talking about that which has no name is conceived as a process of examination in which art is seen as a series of encounters and situations that happen in time. Four variations, four rooms, four concepts: tool, method, idea and system – these are the underpinnings of the thought and work of Paris.
The “tools” are drawings, educational exercises, utensils, games, prototypes. Here, thought is seen as an exercise, while the tools are there to help with setting out ideas. They are not mere techniques of representation, but rather comprise a system of thought that allows us to exchange views.
The “methods” are traditionally taught in a school-style learning environment. By rethinking and playing with the concept of the classroom, the architecture is devised by Paris in such a way that it is transformed into a working process itself, as well as a set of routines that give rise to spaces of exchange in which social skills and learning habits are developed. Each classroom, where the viewer decides what he or she wants to learn or unlearn, is a structure in which the artist’s interests cross with the visitors’ experiences. Every model offers a space to discover relationships, an architecture that serves as a trigger for thinking about different ways of socializing, in a process of learning and failure combined.
The exhibition shifts scale in order to tackle the “idea”. In a small architectural installation, an object suggests that an idea is something that is always being constructed and developed. It is something transformative that we cannot fully access; something that can grow in a number of possible ways, that emerges in time, and that lies in the hands of each viewer.
Under normal circumstances, education would be the system and architecture the method, but in this exhibition this state of affairs is reversed. Education is now seen as a conceptual, logical institution that allows us to learn by association. It is a process that provides room for thought and generates ideas, sparking one or more experiences. A set of short films that are at once demonstrations of the use of the tools and brief poetic essays, and which activate ideas and processes that have already been presented in the exhibition.

Foreign Places is conceived as an alternative travel guide, which accompanies the eponymous exhibition. The eight contributing artists were invited by Stefano Faoro, designer of this publication and also a former WIELS resident, to imagine a place for the book page in which their work is invested – whether it is a building, city or series of locations. The final text chapter features ‘A Glossary of Place Names’ by WIELS curator Caroline Dumalin, which emphatically locates the artists’ image sequences, as well as the essay ‘From Beirut to Brussels: Notes on Curating as an Exercise in Attachment’ by guest curator Grégory Castéra, who delivers a personal account of the challenges involved in working abroad and attaching oneself temporarily to a place or a practice.